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I've heard this said numerous times, so I'm going to disagree on the record. I think syntax of a programming language is a very important characteristic.

A language with a nice syntax is easier to learn, easier to read and understand, and delightful to write.

Crystal's syntax is a great differentiator between it and its statically typed, garbage-collecting competition.

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Exactly! I guess people used to the Ruby syntax are just desensitized or don't know how much of a joy programming can be without having to type 'end' everywhere.

The end keywords is just a minor detail and can be inserted by a smart editor anyway.

Things like list comprehensions and do notation are examples of nice syntactic sugar.

Sensitive whitespace like Python can be nice to write and read, but it's hard(er) to write a parser for it and that's why Python's tooling hasn't been great in the past.

That said, Ruby is even harder to parse and I don't like it aesthetically either.

I think the same could be said about the joy of not having to have perfect whitespace.

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